The Art & Science of Customer-Centricity

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Let’s get a few things straight. Just because someone is a member of your loyalty program doesn’t make them loyal. Just because a customer takes advantage of loyalty program discounts or redeems reward points doesn’t mean they are loyal either. Just because your brand is a consumer’s preferred choice is not a reliable indicator of their loyalty. And owning a large share of wallet, or garnering high rates of customer satisfaction, does not guarantee loyalty either.

By now, hopefully we understand that loyalty goes beyond behavior. Loyalty is an emotion. Loyalty is what allows a brand to command a price premium in the face of similar competition. Loyalty is why we stay when an organization has the inevitable screw up. Loyal customers aren’t always looking around for a better option or shifting their spending to a competitor when they dangle a sexy offer. Loyal customers trust us. Loyal customers drive our profitability. Loyal customers amplify our story.

When I was at Neiman Marcus, analysts–and the private equity investors that eventually bought us–were very impressed that we generated over half our revenues from our InCircle Rewards loyalty program. Alas that statistic was largely meaningless. Many of those customers were far from loyal, as subsequent events proved out. Sears (another of my former employers) makes a big deal about having some 80% of its sales come from their Shop Your Way program. If you think most (or many) of them have even a modicum of loyalty to Sears, I’m afraid you are very wrong.

One of the key things to understand about truly loyal customers is that they perceive switching costs to be high. In the good old days–i.e. before the internet–switching costs were often high due to scarcity of choice, access, information and risk amelioration. Today, with a nearly infinite assortment of products and services available online, 24/7 shopping, a multitude of user review sites and liberal return polices, perceived switching costs, in many cases, have plummeted.

The rise of digitally driven business models is fraying traditional bonds. The potential for new concepts to dramatically lower the cost-to-serve customers (think Uber or Netflix) and these brands’ willingness to spend freely–and often uneconomically–to acquire new customers (think every venture-funded dotcom business) is shifting the balance of power between industry incumbents and the upstarts that seek to peel away their loyal base. The potential to deliver a radically re-designed shopping experience can fundamentally redefine the basis for customer relationships.

This means the loyalty we take for granted can often be eroded very quickly. And overestimating loyalty is now not only common, it is increasingly dangerous.

We overestimate loyalty when we confuse behavior with emotion.

We overestimate loyalty when we don’t understand switching costs.

We overestimate loyalty when we can’t see how an outsider can attack our vulnerabilities and eliminate friction in our shopping experience.

There are plenty of examples of brands that had a large and seemingly loyal following that evaporated virtually overnight (I’m looking at you Blackberry and Blockbuster).

Label customers as “loyal” with considerable care. Understand the roots of their loyalty deeply. Dissect your vulnerabilities objectively and relentlessly.

Most importantly, work hard to eliminate the friction from your customers’ experience. If you don’t, be sure someone else will.

And overestimate loyalty at great peril.

HT to Nicole for helping advance my thinking on this topic

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During the past 25 years Sears had at least three opportunities to transform itself by entering the home improvement warehouse business (I worked on two of them). This was probably the only way Sears was going to ultimately survive and unlock the value of its franchise Kenmore and Craftsman brands. Each time the answer was “no.”

When I headed up strategy at the Neiman Marcus Group (2004-08), we evaluated building a leadership position in omni-channel by consolidating our disparate inventory systems, we recommended moving from a channel centric marketing organization to a customer and brand focused one, we proposed aggressively expanding our off-price format and, having understood the share lost to competitors like Nordstrom, we analyzed improvements to our merchandising and service models to become a bit more accessible. Ultimately we said “no” to moving ahead on all of these. Years later, these strategies were ultimately resurrected. But the opportunity to establish and extend a leadership position may have been lost.

Obviously there are plenty of times when either the smart or moral thing to do is to say ‘no.” Obviously it’s easy to look back and say “I told you so.”

Yet systemically, most organizations are set up to reward the status quo (often cost containment and driving incremental improvement) and punish the well intended experiment. So it’s easy to say “yes” to the historically tried and true and “no” to just about everything else.

Of course we don’t have to look very hard to come up with brands that have been struggling for many, many years (Sears, JC Penney, Radio Shack) or have completely imploded (Borders, Blockbuster, etc.). All of these said “no’ to any number of potentially game-changing strategies along the way. Care to hazard a guess at how many long-term Board Members of these perennial laggards and outright losers got pushed out for saying grace over a series of crippling “no’s”? How many CEO’s had their compensation whacked for never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity?

In a world where change is coming at us faster and faster, we need to be challenged just as much on what we are saying ‘no” to as we are on what gets a “yes.”

And If you think there is always time to fix the wrong “no” decision, you might want to think again.

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We’re told to hyper-focus on our core customers. After all, doesn’t most of our profit come from a small group of loyalists and “heavy-users”?

We’re admonished to double-down on our highest ROI marketing strategies. Surely if a moderate amount of email or direct mail or re-targeting is working, more must be even better, right?

And exhortations to find our strengths, exploit our core competenciesand “stick to our knitting” are central to many best sellers and legendary Harvard Business Review articles

Lather, rinse and repeat.

And this all makes a lot of sense. Until it doesn’t.

The past few years have brought us dozens, if not hundreds, of brands that have gone away–think Blockbuster, Borders and, very shortly, Radio Shack–largely through adhering to these notions. Still others sit on the brink of irrelevance–I’m looking at you Sears and Blackberry–because they pushed a singular way of thinking well past its expiration date and, sadly, the point of no return.

Even far stronger and far better managed brands fall into the trap of overplaying their hands. Neiman Marcus (my former employer)–along with many other luxury brands–have had to re-work their strategies because they became overly reliant on a narrow set of highly profitable customers and failed to acquire and retain other important and emerging cohorts.

It’s all too easy to become distracted by peripheral issues or to stray into areas where we have few useful capabilities. We always must be mindful of where the customer gives us–or where we can readily earn–permission to go.

But in a world that is changing ever faster, and where new competitors can often launch highly disruptive business models in short order, what got us to where we are isn’t likely to get us to where we need to be.

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Shortly after I became the head of strategy and multi-channel marketing at The Neiman Marcus Group I was asked to lead a strategic planning session for our senior executives. One of the exercises I suggested was a deep dive on our opportunities and vulnerabilities against each of our key competitors. As I reviewed my overall plan one of the top leaders responded, “I like the overall approach, but you need to take Nordstrom off your list. They’re not a competitor.”

Having come to Neiman’s after 12 years at Sears–which I affectionately call my journey from the outhouse to the penthouse–I will admit that my experience in the nuances of the luxury industry was pretty lacking at that point. I certainly understood that a substantial percentage of our customers were fabulously wealthy and preferred brands that you simply could not get at Nordstrom. But I had already learned that many of our shoppers were much less affluent and that we sold quite a few brands that overlapped. Nevertheless, being the new guy–and not especially confident in my hypotheses–I acquiesced. We didn’t talk about Nordstrom.

About a year later my team initiated an in-depth analysis of customer spending and activity trends. Ultimately what we found was pretty disturbing. While our very top spending group was growing in sales and margin rate, customers that represented about 2/3 of our sales had weakening stats.

As it turned out, virtually all our sales growth during the preceding 5 years was driven by raising our average unit prices and the growth of our e-commerce business. After much hemming and hawing about the value (and cost) of doing consumer research, we finally got approval to do a series of studies to understand the underlying drivers of these outcomes. We learned a lot, most of which Neiman’s failed to act upon until the financial crisis hit. But the overwhelming conclusion was that when we lost customers (or a portion of a customer’s spending) the majority of that leakage was to Nordstrom.

Oops.

The point of this story is not to point out the limitations of the Neiman’s culture at that time, nor the power of my intuition. The fact is you don’t have to do much digging to find similar examples of mis-reading the consumer and failing to respond adequately playing out, over and over again, in any and all parts of industry.

Sometimes competition is rather direct even when there is a major value proposition innovation. Flash-sale sites clearly competed for a certain segment of the fashion business. Digital books and music obviously challenged the underlying business models of Borders and Blockbuster.

Sometimes competition might be less direct and its game-changing impact may be harder to glean at first. I’m not sure what the brand management teams at Folger’s and Maxwell House were thinking during the initial growth of Starbucks, but it’s now clear that there was a dramatic consumer preference shift that those brands failed to address–and a huge value creation opportunity that they didn’t participate in.

Even harder to see is when consumers have a more macro-substitution effect. For example, with some consumer segments, we’ve seen a broad and long-term trend to greater interest in personal experiences. This shift has, in many cases, supplanted spending on certain physical goods.

As in most elements of good strategy development the keys are pretty simple:

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“If you have the same problem for a long time, maybe it’s not a problem. Maybe it’s a fact.”

-Yitzhak Rabin

“Facts are simple and facts are straight Facts are lazy and facts are late Facts all come with points of view Facts don’t do what I want them to”

– Talking Heads, “Cross-eyed and Painless”

I’d wager that the vast majority of business failures are rooted in a profound denial of reality. The demise or persistent flailing of Borders, Blockbuster, Sears–and many other current or future residents of the retail graveyard–stems largely from a lack of awareness and acceptance of the unassailable facts of shifting consumer behavior.

It’s far too easy to dismiss an industry upstart or new technology as a fad or hype, until it’s too late. It’s common to worry more about protecting your turf rather than embracing a product or service for yourself that you fear “cannabilizes” your core.

Of course this is commonplace in interpersonal relations and communications as well. I know I can be quick to defend my behavior when I know deep down I’m the one who made the mistake, I’m the one who needs to change.

The next time someone challenges your business or your point of view, maybe your first reaction shouldn’t be to dismiss or defend.

Facts may not do what you want them to. But that doesn’t make them untrue. Ignore them at your own peril.

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Until Amazon–and a handful of other pure-play concepts–emerged as power-house brands, a retail growth strategy largely consisted of two major components: build bigger stores and create a bigger retail footprint.

Whether you were Walmart, Office Depot, Coach or Lowe’s, your strategy was mostly about pushing the limits of market dominance: expanding your assortments to cover every related purchase occasion and expanding locations to cover every trade area perceived to be viable.

Then digital happened, and if a large part of your product offering could be delivered without the need of a physical location (think Best Buy, Blockbuster or Borders–and that’s just the “B’s”) this has proved to be a big problem indeed.

And show-rooming happened, and if you were in categories where the consumer likes the research service found in a brick and mortar location, but ultimately buys on price, you were losing a lot of business to direct-to-consumer players not burdened by your overhead structure.

Then there’s the emergence of omni-channel retailing, and if you aren’t making it frictionless for your customer to shop anytime, anywhere, anyway, you were losing share to those who have truly embraced customer-centric retailing.

Last, but not least, the recession happened, and many of the consumers you were counting on–you know, the ones that had become weapons of massive consumption fueled by easy credit–suddenly pulled back big time, and many of the locations you opened in the last five years or so are dead in the water.

So for most, it’s time to shrink.

Fewer, more productive stores. New, smaller formats that resonate more strongly with today’s blended channel realities and that can work in different kinds of trade areas.

But if you think getting smaller is just about physical space, think again.

When you think smaller, think more intimate. Become more personalized, more intensely relevant. Treat different customers differently.

In the future the customer shouldn’t walk away from interacting with your brand thinking that you have down-sized. They should feel that you know them, you get them and that your brand was built with them at the center of all that you do.

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Maybe you have noticed that e-commerce has been growing far faster than brick and mortar retail. That’s been true for years and it’s not changing any time soon.

Maybe you have noticed the explosion in comparison shopping sites that allow customers to easily search for the merchant with the best price. The number and quality of these sites will continue to grow, with powerful mobile applications right around the corner.

Maybe you have noticed that as more retailers cut back on sales associates–or fail to train them so that they become merely order takers, baggers or direction providers–the “value proposition” of actually buying something in a physical store becomes less and less attractive.

So I have to ask you, is your store a relevant, differentiated and remarkable experience for your target customer? Or is it slowly, but inexorably, becoming a showroom; a place for the customer to see, touch and feel your product, but less and less a place to actually buy stuff.

The economics of leasing a store, fixturing it, filling it with inventory and staffing it are untenable if an increasing percentage of your customers are only there for research and will ultimately buy elsewhere because the experience or price is better.

Blockbuster and Borders may well be on the way to insolvency because they botched this transition. Best Buy is doing far better, but faces significant risks of their physical stores becoming more and more a showroom every day. And this is just the “B’s.”

Becoming a showroom is death.

Do you know what percent of your traffic uses your physical stores mostly for research purposes, only to buy elsewhere? I bet it’s higher than you think.